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Overview

Within the space of a single year, Craig Murray went from being a British Ambassador to describing his occupation as a professional dissident.Tony Blair's premiership was an extraordinary time. It represented the abandonment by the official party of the "left" in the UK to the ideology of neo-liberalism. It also represented a complete commitment to aggressive foreign policy. Tony Blair engaged in more wars than any other British Prime Minister since the heyday of the Empire.This was accompanied by the "War on Terror", a period where the media whipped up fears of terrorist attack and government passed an entire series of measures limiting civil liberties. There was a real sense that society was changing permanently to accept a more authoritarian form of government.Craig Murray was a most improbable focus of resistance to this change. An old fashioned character still given to wearing three piece suits, he regarded himself more as a liberal than a socialist. His political gestures were sometimes Quixotic, for example in standing as an independent candidate against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency in the 2005 general election.But a combination of his patent honesty, muscular logic and fluent writing style gradually found its audience. On Murray's part, we could discern a series of influences that were pushing him ineluctably to the left.Firstly, his anti war instincts drove him into the orbit of the Stop the War campaign. Many of his speeches in this period were given alongside Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn.Secondly, his concern for freedom of information left him exasperated with attempts to censor his memoir, Murder in Samarkand. He saw himself as a whistleblower and began contact with Wikileaks. Thirdly, his experience of the persecution of Muslims in Uzbekistan led him to compare that with the impact of the anti-terror legislation on Muslim communities in the UK.Finally, he was horrified by the growth of wealth inequality in the UK and end of state provision of many services, and particularly at the introduction of university tuition fees.While not a major political figure, he is an interesting and a prescient one and can be seen as a precursor to the current age of insurgency politics.

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About the Author

Craig Murray is a historian, writer and human rights activist. He is a former British Ambassador and former Rector of the University of Dundee. He is currently best known as a whistleblower and for his work alongside WikiLeaks.

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